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Ever since I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by “abroad” – by which I mean, from my Anglo-centric viewpoint, any country that wasn’t the UK. I’m of a certain age, which means I predate email, when the only way of contacting people abroad was to send them airmail letter. I vividly remember the excitement of seeing one of those lovely blue envelopes hit the mat, the glamour and mystique of the strange address and the poetry of the phrase “par avion”. Weeks would pass between posting a letter and getting a reply, the excitement would build and the eventual letter would be read and re-read, digested, considered and then finally responded to.

All that’s changed now, of course. Nowadays, I can text friends on the other side of the world and get a reply almost instantly – assuming they’re awake, of course. I can share pictures of events with friends in at least six other countries (and comment on pictures of their events) through Facebook and Twitter. The waiting for the postman has gone, replaced by the much shorter wait for the ping of the email inbox. Lest this sound like an old man’s paean to a bygone age, let me be clear: what we’ve lost in romance we’ve more than gained in sheer convenience. I’m in touch with friends now in a way that simply wouldn’t be possible twenty – or even ten – years ago.

But there is, of course, a price to be paid. Email has revolutionised communication but it’s brought a whole slew of problems along with its tremendous advantages. And while email itself is steadily becoming less popular amongst what I suppose I must now call the “younger generation” it’s still the dominant form used in business. So if you feel overwhelmed by email, over the next couple of weeks I’ll be taking a look at some email best-practise to help alleviate the information overload you might be feeling.

We’ll start next week by looking at a few of the basic skills but if you have any hints and tips on how to make email – and, in particular, the main tool for using email, Microsoft’s Outlook – work better for you, do please drop me a line.

The normalisation of deviance

Every now and then, in my travels across the internet, I come across a quotation so perfect that I’ll start using it on every workshop I run. I found one of those quotes the other day and I’ve been using it everywhere I can ever since:

Each uneventful day that passes reinforces a steadily growing false sense of confidence that everything is all right – that I, we, my group must be OK because the way we did things today resulted in no adverse consequences.

It’s a quote from Scott Snook, Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, and is used in the context of the “normalisation of deviance” which is not as much fun as it sounds.

It describes a situation whereby a group or an organisation, usually under duress, takes a risk or a short-cut that it wouldn’t normally take. Perhaps it eases its safety procedures or lowers its quality control standards. Whatever it is, the decision is made in good faith that the measure is only temporary and that normal service or standards will be resumed when the crisis or unusual circumstances have passed.

However the group realises, consciously or unconsciously, that having taken a risk they have, effectively, gotten away with it – nothing bad has happened. And so, instead of returning to the stricter procedures, the laxer regime is allowed to continue. The longer this goes on without any adverse consequences, the more used to it the group or organisation becomes – essentially forgetting that there is any risk involved in what they’re doing as the deviant procedure or process becomes part of the normal, everyday run of things.

This applies to serious and tragic events such as the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and to trivial events, like me being pulled over by the police because one of my headlights wasn’t working. It hadn’t been working for a while; I knew I had to fix it but the longer I left it the more normal it became until I had forgotten that I was taking a risk

And this is the key thing, I think. At the start, we know we’re running a risk but when disaster doesn’t strike we forget that risk doesn’t mean that an event will happen – merely that it is possible. The longer we continue without the risked event occurring, the more we forget that the risk is still there – it just hasn’t happened yet. As the deviance is normalised we forget the risk that’s being taken and then suddenly disaster arrives out of, apparently, nowhere.

Are you successful? Are you, your team, your organisation doing well? Are you doing well because of the actions you’re taking or despite them? What risks have you normalised? What disaster, even now, as you read this, could be building because of a deviant procedure that you might even have forgotten about? Sleep well – and don’t have nightmares.

Unaccustomed as I am...

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been flying to and from Scotland, increasing the size of my carbon footprint so I could talk to people about communicating the importance of sustainable lifestyles. It’s been an interesting project and they’ve all been really great groups to work with. Plus, there’s been the added bonus of hanging around university campuses, where the energy and enthusiasm of the students has just been infectious.

A couple of key bits of feedback kept coming up as I was watching the presentations delegates were making and so I thought I’d share them with you. Bear these points in mind, next time you have to talk to a group of people:

Know what you’re trying to achieve

Surprising, but often the speakers didn’t really know why they were talking to the group – they hadn’t worked out, in their minds, what the purpose of their presentation was. Getting this clear in your mind guides everything else in the presentation. Think carefully about what you want your audience to do, know and feel at the end of your talk and then gear your talk to these objectives.

Use signposting and headings

Talking to a group is like giving someone a huge block of text to read, with no paragraphs, no spacing and no headings. Pretty soon, readers get bored and switch off – the same is true of your audience if you don’t structure your talk. The old cliché with speakers is to use the three Ts – first, tell your audience what you’re going to tell them; secondly, tell them what you want to tell them; thirdly, tell them what you just told them. Audiences drift in and out and if you say something only once, there’s no guarantee that people will hear it. If it’s a particularly important point and you want the group to remember it, don’t be afraid to signpost it for your listeners and tell them that it’s an important point.

Know your “in” and your “out”

To be fair to them, most of the speakers I saw knew their “in” – that is, they knew how they were going to start their presentation. If you can find a way of doing this that’s funny, attention grabbing and memorable, so much the better. However, very few speakers knew their “out” – that is, what to do at the other end of the talk. So instead of ending, the talk/presentation just “fizzled out” and left the audience with a negative impression. As part of your planning, know what your concluding point is and end your talk with something other than “and, er, that’s it...”

If you Google “top ten fears” you’ll find that public speaking features in most, if not all, of the lists. There’s no question that most people find speaking to groups to be a very painful experience; with a few simple techniques, it doesn’t have to be a painful experience for your group, too.

Confidence Tricks (Part Two)

The competency profile for trainers is an interesting one. I’ve always have joked that we have to be part Blue Peter presenter, part sadist and part furniture remover but there is another element to it, one that goes unspoken amongst trainers. Well, today I’m breaking the code because the one competency that all trainers have in common is that we’re psychic – we can read your mind. And because I can read your mind, I know what it is that you want. Deep down, you want to be confident.

You may laugh (I certainly hope you do) but I can be fairly – pardon the phrase – confident that you want to be confident because I’m playing the odds, rather than reading your mind. When I ask people what they want from this assertiveness workshop, or time management workshop or leadership workshop the answer the majority give is a variation on “I want to be more confident.”

Being part sadist, my immediate response to that request is “When you say ‘more confident,’ what does that mean to you?” The answer is enlightening because, very often, they don’t actually know. In fact, when I ask them what confidence actually is, they can’t define it for me. So I press on (told you I was a sadist) and ask them “What has to happen in order for you to feel confident?” Again, they usually don’t have an answer.

Rosabeth Moss Kantor defines confidence in this way: “Confidence is certainly mental, but it's... a situational expectation – an expectation of a positive outcome. And that expectation leads to all kinds of investments in making that outcome come true. Because of confidence people put in the effort. They invest financial and other resources. Instead of giving up, they stay in the game longer and, therefore, have more chances to succeed...” But now we know what it is, how do we know we have it and how do we get it?

Confidence is a belief and it’s slippery – sometimes our minds play tricks on us. If confidence is an expectation of a positive outcome, my advice is to look at the evidence in your life. Look for the situations that you have found yourself in and which you have handled; look for those situations that you influenced, turned around, resolved, dealt with. I’m willing to bet (because, after all, I’m psychic) that, more often than not, the outcome was positive – whatever it was, you dealt with it and it turned out okay in the end. The fact is, you’re already a confident person; you just have to start trusting the evidence in your own life and believing it.

Are you being served?

I'm fortunate in that, even in my mid forties, I still have hair. So periodically, I head off to a hairdresser in town to get it cut. I’m not a big fan of getting a haircut – it’s a strictly utilitarian thing for me – and I’ve been fairly free with my choice of hairdressers over the years, never really sticking to one in particular. However, I've been going to the same hairdresser on a roughly monthly basis for nearly three years now; he’s local, seems like a nice guy and he was having a few problems with his business in the early years, so I stuck with him out of a sense of solidarity – small businesses sticking together.

So, here’s the routine. Every month, the same guy cuts my hair. Every month, I get the same haircut. Every month, he asks me how I want it cut and every month I give the same reply. Every month, in response to my reply, he queries whether I really have my hair that short. Then he cuts it, I pay him and the whole thing starts up again in about four weeks’ time. During the haircut, he'll often ask me what I do for a living - I've lost count of the number of times he's asked me. I usually give a different reply every time, just to see whether he notices - he hasn't so far or, at least, if he has he hasn't mentioned the many discrepancies in my stories.

When I first noticed it, I found it amusing but recently it’s started to bug me; the last time I went, there were two of us waiting and he asked “which one of you is Steve?” Is it really too much to expect that, after let’s say at least thirty visits – he might remember who I am? Is it really so difficult to make a little note of who your customers are, what they do for a living, how they like to have their hair cut?

It’s not bad customer service – it’s not like he’s insulting me or being rude or overcharging me or anything like that. It’s just an example of poor customer service. He’s a good enough hairdresser; don’t get me wrong – the core service he provides is perfectly adequate. But I could easily be persuaded to go to another hairdresser, one who offered a similar core service but a better customer service. All for the want of a few, easily taken, steps.

It’s worth thinking about the service you offer – not just the core service but the customer service. Are you building loyal customers? A very good friend of mine runs a company called Spice Learning and they’re doing a series on the “A to Z of Customer Service” at the moment – if you suspect your customers might be feeling a little open to persuasion by other suppliers, I’d recommend you take a look.

On a personal note, the blog is taking a short break. The next “official” post will be on 15^th October, although there may be some shorter updates before then, depending on my access to the internet. Have a great couple of weeks.

Telling your story

Before I get to the subject of this week’s blog, I’d like to ask you to do me a favour. To do this, you’ll need a piece of paper and a pen and you’ll also need to pay very close attention to your mind. I’m going to give you a word and I’d like you to write down the first word you think of when you see the word I’m going to give you. It can be any word you like, whatever pops into your head but, as I said, you’ll need to pay very close attention to your mind.

Are you ready? The word is: choice. Write down the word you associate with choice and we’ll come back to it in a while.

I was working with a group this week, helping them work out what they wanted to do with their lives and careers. This obviously involves some goal setting and that goal can be very general or it can be very specific. To use a journey as an analogy, your destination could be as general as London or as specific as a particular address. Neither is better than the other but, in order to set off in any meaningful way, you’ll probably need at least a general idea of where you’re going.

One of the delegates was completely unable to do this. She had, she claimed, absolutely no idea of where she was going. Not only that, she was sceptical about the whole process. There were too many other things that could happen in the future – including the old cliché of falling under a bus tomorrow (I checked: she didn’t) – and for her that made planning or goal setting pointless and impossible.

We spent some time thinking about the journey she had already made in her life and it occurred to me that we can tell our life stories in one of three ways. It can be a story of chance – luck, coincidences and random happenings. It can be a story of destiny – you were fated to marry that person, born to do that job. Or it can be a story of choice – where you are today is a result of the choices you made yesterday and the day before and the day before that. All of those three options, it seems to me, are equally valid; it’s your autobiography and you can tell it any way you choose. However, only one of those options allows you to have any part in building your future, and that’s choice.

Go back to the word you wrote. Some people write negative words – burden, difficulty, overwhelming; some write positive words – freedom, autonomy, excitement. I wonder what you wrote. And I wonder how much the word you associate with choice will determine the way you tell your autobiography – and the extent to which you write your own future.

Banking Crisis

If you deposit more money in your bank account than you with draw, your balance will increase. The more your balance increases, the more interest the bank pays you – increasing your balance further – and the kindly your bank looks upon you. Get a big enough balance and other banks may court you for your business. On the other hand, if you withdraw more than you deposit, the balance will decrease. It won’t stop at zero, however: your account will go overdrawn, taking you into the mysterious realm of negative numbers. The more overdrawn you go, the more your bank will charge you – decreasing your balance even further. If you continually go overdrawn, your bank will probably ask you to take your business elsewhere. Decrease your balance to such a level that you cannot possibly pay it back and you’re likely to be declared bankrupt – which makes further banking (and other things) problematic to say the least.

In his book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” Stephen Covey talks about the Emotional Bank Account. It’s a metaphor for the state of relationships and works in the same way as a normal bank account except that, instead of money, the balance is the level of trust in the relationship.

Some actions you can take – we’ll call them deposits – will improve the relationship, increasing balance of trust in the emotional bank account you hold with the person concerned. The higher the emotional bank account balance, the better the relationship and the more benefits you with both reap from it. Some actions you can take – withdrawals – will harm the relationship, reducing the level of trust. Keep making withdrawals and your emotional bank account with the person concerned becomes so overdrawn that the relationship breaks down. Do it often enough with enough people and you’ll become bankrupt and, no matter what you do or say, no one trusts you anymore; even things you sincerely intend as deposits will be seen as withdrawals.

I was reminded of this as I read a lot of the coverage about the publication of Tony Blair’s memoirs. I’m not making a political comment but it was interesting to see how, no matter what he said or explanations he tried to give, no matter what deposits he tried to make, they were interpreted as withdrawals by some. Even giving a potential £4m to the British Legion was seen by some as self-serving; they just wouldn’t believe him, no matter what he said.

We all make withdrawals occasionally – it’s just part of being human. An apology is usually all it takes to restore the relationship. But make sure you notice the withdrawals; we may not all run countries, head political parties or start wars but it’s still possible for us to end up bankrupt.